FOSSDLE PieFedPixelFed has increased the Fediverse's monthly active users by over 40% in the last few weeks, how do we feel?
submitted by
Riley
You can see it if you check https://fedidb.org/. Monthly active users have gone from just a hair under one million to somewhere around 1.4 million and still growing. How do we think this will go? How do we feel about this influx of new users? Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn't?
I feel like I didn't really recognize having different "platforms" like Mastodon, PixelFed, etc would give multiple opportunities for the fediverse to make a "first" impression with people.
Just my guesses though, but like any social media it really depends on if big creators will switch and if users stick with it over time
Is the iPhone app still missing darkmode?
What about Android? I don't see dark mode in options.
Dang for some reason I thought Android had it.
yup… (at least in the stable channel)
what’s most infuriating is that it used to have it but at some point they redesigned the app and made it worse…?
you don’t have to imitate instagram that much, dansup
I think it was more that he wanted to open source the app but had built it while he was learning so it was pretty messy and he felt insecure about it. So he rebuilt the app from scratch and open-sourced it. It just isn't quite at feature parity to the old app yet. Pretty sure dark mode is coming in the next update though.
oooh, yea that’s a good point
and, I mean, the app was in beta, sudden changes are to be expected
but still, I feel like the app was so much better before… its kinda frustrating
Agreed. It immediately went from being maybe the best app in the Fediverse to the 3rd best for its own service. I stopped using Pixelfed altogether until Pixelix got good enough to be a replacement.
I honestly don't understand how getting the new app to feature parity with the old wasn't maximum priority. It at least seems like it's going to get there pretty soon.
This.
Discovery and user abstraction are Lemmy's biggest issues and we are not addressing them to the degree we should.
I know there's some stuff on all those centralized platforms that's way over the top, but most of it is actually pretty helpful. And you'll miss it once you switch here.
What do you mean by user abstraction? First I've seen this mentioned, or put this way.
Relates to what server an account is on and how it affects the experience. Most people don’t want to know/care
Oh thanks for giving me a proper term to use when pointing at my biggest problem with the Fediverse.
Has it ever been discussed by any developers? Is it technically possible for ActivityPub? Would the costs be exorbitant?
There are different options to solve this. The current “solve” is to dump everyone on one big server. Mastodon.social, lemmy.world, etc.
Another solution might be a button that sends you to a random top10 instance. Might work for mastodon but lemmy servers defederate like hell and some of the biggest instances are .ml, hexbear, etc.
XMPP has this tiered list https://providers.xmpp.net/ but it’s the same problem of expecting users to care what a server is
I don’t have solution, and if you do then I’m not the person you should be telling :)
Discovery? Interesting thought.
I tried out pixelfed and the pixelix app for the past couple weeks.
The "discovery" page on the official app is worse than useless. It shows almost nobody with over 10 followers, highlighting one person with 50-100 followers, then shows "popular on the fediverse" which are thumbnails of posts of the people it just recommended. It always recommends at least 5 of the same people day after day, week after week, even people you already follow.
The official app can't even show a global feed so it is literally impossible to discover new people unless you know their name and specifically search for them, or they are recommended by luck on the discover page (of which there are multiple repeats per day, so not likely)
Pixelix at least allows you to view a global feed though. Definitely a better experience, but Lemmy discovery is not any worse than that.
The Discovery section in Pixelfed definitely needs work, but the ability to follow hashtags offsets that somewhat. I’ve found loads of great photographers to follow off the back of following hashtags that I’m interested in.
Absolutely agree with this.
It's hard to discover something new, sometimes.
I don't think Mastodon was really competing with Bluesky. Bluesky is way ahead while Fediverse fanboys thought people would somehow just learn to use Mastodon. (while they wouldn't shut up about Bluesky)
The tide lifts all the boats... there is also a noticeable uptick in Lemmy registrations, at least here on our instance.
Exactly. I do not care much for Pixelfed. Or Mastodon. Or Friendica. Or really much of anything other than Lemmy. But I just stood up my own PixelFed server, so if someone wants to get away from Meta, I will happily support their decision (and pixelfed.social's server by offloading resources) and they can find me there.
Yup, I spotted a few Lemmy accounts that were less than a week old recently. Very nice.
I *think* I've also seen new communities being created too
My script may or may not have picked up the data correctly. I thought I had it working but during writing down the data I noticed that the new 196 blahaj community wasn't showing up in communities from this month and was categorised as 2023.06. After tinkering with the script a bit and rerunning the script it's now correctly categorised as from this month but who knows if there are any other errors. And due to writing this down manually I could have made some mistakes myself too. :p
New communities by month:
2025.01 - 313
2024.12 - 267
2024.11 - 311
2024.10 - 264
2024.09 - 249
2024.08 - 321
2024.07 - 344
2024.06 - 411
2024.05 - 449
2024.04 - 484
2024.03 - 704
2024.02 - 500
2024.01 - 422
New communities this month by instance: (potential typos) (I just pasted it into the lemmy ui only to realise it doesn't have a monofont ;-; (Edit: it seems to actually get rid of additional spaces anyway.))
lemmy.world - sixty-nice
lemm.ee - 27
lemmynsfw.com - 23
lemmy.org - 21
lemmy.blahaj.zone - 18
lemmy.dbzer0.com - 12
sh.itjust.works - 10
realbitcoin.cash - 9
lemmy.ml - 8
lemmy.sdf.org - 6
lemmy.zip - 6
discuss.tchncs.de - 5
literature.cafe - 5
ani.social - 4
feddit.org - 4
jlai.lu - 4
lemmy.ca - 4
lemmy.lqx.net - 4
redlemmy.com - 4
slrpnk.net - 4
sopuli.xyz - 4
discuss.online - 3
lemmy.today - 3
dubvee.org - 2
feddit.it - 2
feddit.uk - 2
lemmy.cafe - 2
lemmy.spronkus.xyz - 2
lemmyusa.com - 2
szmer.info - 2
zerobytes.monster - 2
discuss.jacen.moe - 1
fasheng.ing - 1
feddit.dk - 1
feddit.nl - 1
g00n.cloud - 1
hackertalks.com - 1
hexbear.net - 1
info.prou.be - 1
lemmings.world - 1
lemmy.amxl.com - 1
lemmy.chrisco.me - 1
lemmy.eco.br - 1
lemmy.studio - 1
lemmy.wtf - 1
lemmygrad.ml - 1
lemuria.es - 1
mander.xyz - 1
midwest.social - 1
monero.town - 1
pawb.social - 1
ponder.cat - 1
programming.dev - 1
r.nf - 1
real.lemmy.fan - 1
reddthat.com - 1
thelemmy.club - 1
ttrpg.network - 1
vegantheoryclub.org - 1
walledgarden.xyz - 1
0xdd.org.ru - 1
Top 15 most popular (subscribers) new communities created this month: (excluding nsfw ofc)
!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone - 1.77k
!keeptrack@lemmy.world - 544
!actually_infuriating@lemmy.world - 346
!sideoftheroad@lemmy.today - 265
!youtubeclassics@sh.itjust.works - 229
!Football@lemm.ee - 193
!quityourbullshit@lemmy.world - 184
!growthefediverse@slrpnk.net - 183
!webrevival@lemm.ee - 151
!shitprop@quokk.au - 124
!Autism@lemmy.dbzer0.com - 123
!19684@lemmy.blahaj.zone - 121
!latin@lemm.ee - 119
!lesbians@lemmy.blahaj.zone - 118
!buyeuropean@feddit.uk - 112
Oh wow, thanks for putting it into perspective! Those are very interesting stats:)
(Also lol, apparently not that many more communities are being created)
My script had batch processing of the data with the batch sizes being set to 200. With that the result of communities for this month I was getting was 125. After setting the batch size to 1 making it process each community separately it changed to 313 so who knows if there are any other problems with the script. :p
Oooh, I will need to look into the lemmyverse json file to find out what they are. :D
This makes sense to me.
All these people had to pick an instance and now probably understand how to do that.
That’s the biggest hurdle to signing up for lemmy or mastodon.
Me in 2024: "Which one is the main one?"
"There is no main one"
"Which one is the biggest?"
"Lemmy.World"
"Thats the one for me!"
"THATS NOT HOW YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO DO IT!!!"
".....but that's what I did."
Some people care, most don't. Lemmy.world is the vanilla ice cream of the fediverse. Thanks for being part of the community!
I like vanilla ice cream. It's a great base. Maybe today you throw some butterscotch and peacans on it! But tomorrow it's caramel and fudge, and the next day it's chocolate chip cookie dough, and yhe day after that it's whipped cream and strawberry syrup. And the day after that it's chocolate sauce with peanuts.
Meanwhile, the guy who got chocolate just ate the same bowl of ice cream for 5 days.
See it's kind of like sex, too. Some people just do the same thing over and over. But what I do, is I take some handcuffs, and chains, and baby oil, and some.... *trails off*
And that kids, is how I met your Mother!
Here, the issue. People don't feel like small instances would live for long and migrating do not transfer the old posts so people feel more safe subscribing to the large instances
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
Feel free if you have any questions"
You too? I've had more users sign up this month than for many past months!
Yeah, I have also seen an increase in registrations on my instance as well.
Yeah, we usually tick along at 1 or 2 sign-ups a day, 7 days ago that went to 10 and has settled back to 3 or 4.
I don't know if they are coming directly from Pixelfed but there were a few high profile posts about the Fediverse over at The Bad Place, so, following the example of @Blaze@feddit.org, a few of us jumped in to do some missionary work/help man the lifeboats.
Pixelfed's monthly userbase has gone from 15k to almost 300k in the past month. Absolutely massive for the fediverse.
I'll probably try it out eventually^TM^
We can't want the Fediverse to get bigger but be scared of normies when it does. I say welcome in! We should be mindful to listen to the new recruits, because their feedback is the most unbiased.
"We can't want"? Do you mean "wait"?
No; "We can't want X but be Y" is well-formed, like with any other verbs (eg. "We can't swim but stay dry."). It does sound more confusing, but the structure is the same. It means we can't "want X" and "be Y" at the same time. I hope that explanation makes sense.
Thank you
No problem :)
So far so good! Some very unscientific observations from spending an absurd amount of time scrolling local on pixelfed.social:
The people coming from Instagram and TikTok seem *way* less grumpy than the microbloggers. People are having a lot of fun and not complaining about much. It's kind of a trip seeing happy, joyful people on the Fediverse to be honest. Everything in the world suuuuuuuucks right now, so it's felt like a bit of a refuge. Sometimes I'll accidentally bounce over to the global feed and oh man is the change in tone jarring.
People don't seem to have a problem with servers like the Twitter migrants did. Folks are still talking about it a lot on Mastodon though. I've literally not seen a single post about Pixelfed being "too complicated" to succeed, whereas it was (and is) pretty common to see "this place is great and all, but..." posts in the microblogging neighbourhood. Not sure why this is but it might be because the people coming to Pixelfed are generally younger than Mastodon users. This is just a guess, but I'd estimate the average age of Mastodon users is maybe mid-40s. Most of the people pouring into Pixelfed appear to be in their mid-to-late-20s. Perhaps those folks are just more accustomed to servers through Discord and gaming? Though people are generally captioning photos and not writing out lists of things they're unhappy about and they could also just be unaware of servers altogether...
Pixelfed is *easily* the most diverse "corner" of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren't. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.
I've seen a bunch of people on Instagram promoting Feb 1st as "Global Switch Day" so hopefully it'll keep blowing up.
This was a huge part of why I now spend more time over on pixelfed as opposed to here -- I have a few accounts I've used here, and every single time I'm in a thread about a woman who's been sexually assaulted, or about a woman's shelter, etc, the 'not all guys'/'men suffer too' bros come flooding in. I've logged out of accounts for weeks, switched to another one, just to let them scream into the void of my inbox for awhile, and it happens every time. I befriended a woman here when I responded to one of the most sad-to-read replies in one of those threads, that read like: "Women are often abused by men--not all men, just some, and I want to reiterate that this is about those specific men..." and it just went on and on trying to placate the inevitable furious white men in the comments section. As someone who lived as a white man for over forty years, I know just how whiny, sad, and ridiculous they look, and they they still get their way.
Over on pixelfed I haven't once had an interaction even close to that. It's extremely pleasant, people helping each other learn the platform, people asking for help in bad home situations, and it's a community. People have messaged me when I made mistakes linking things in extremely pleasant ways, and two people debated alt-text (is it helpful to those who use audio captions, or is it training AI?) without once insulting each other. Lemmy was very briefly that, yet there's a lot of tribalism that is not only unnecessary, and frankly, childish. I'm quite often embarrassed of my fellow men here.
(Well, non-binary now, yet I still feel the experiences of 40+ years of being a man are helpful.)
So anyway, I agree pixelfed is a lot more inviting, and a lot more diverse.
I think that's, usually, not necessary. The "going on at length" part, that is. People want to know you're not literally Andrea Dworkin, trying to actively reinforce the toxic AF "women are always victims, men are always perpetrators" narrative etc, but it takes like five words to make that clear.
Complications might arise when you're trying to simultaneously assuage hurt men *and* misandrists. I fear it's either "'kill all men' is toxic" or "'kill all men' is a valid expression of your anger, let it all out", there's no real space for compromise, there.
That all said your post and this reply probably wouldn't have happened on pixelfed so your point stands. Disengagement is perfectly valid.
...
/face in hands
Okay I took a minute and I have to go through this with you.
So just so I'm clear, all women have to make clear they don't think what Andrea Dworkin does (sigh), because all men aren't responsible for men as a group being, statistically, the perpetrators of rape, partner violence, etc?
If you start a sentence with "all men" then you should take a step back and say "fucked-up men" or suchlike, is all I'm saying. That was even three words, not five. You can also say something like "men should speak up more often", that's a general call to action, and not a blanket verdict on individuals who might be reading it. The "yes all men" of this song (total banger btw).
This is a general norm I apply to everyone regarding every topic: Don't paint groups with broad, antagonistic, brushes. It never does any good, no matter who does it to whom or whatever the excuses are one might be able to come up with to justify it. The means are vile, the ends at best neutral, there's no benefit to be had.
Also side note at least according to the statistics over here in Germany partner violence, if psychological violence is taken into account, is almost exactly even among hetero couples and, in the overwhelming number of cases, mutual: Assholes hook up with assholes they just, statistically, express it differently. Things might very well look differently where you're from, another reason to not generalise.
No. Also in no example was that how anything started. I said women can talk about being victims of violence and men always do what you're doing right now.
1/3 of German women had experienced physical and/or sexual violence. ONE THIRD.
Stop trying to make this something that's even between men and women. It isn't. You're giving these guys in my inbox furious about exactly the reason for my original fucking comment a green light to do this shit by hand-waving the reality women face.
If this is how Lemmy is going to be, I'm so thankful pixelfed is exploding in size because women deserve the goddamn break.
Glad to see more people introduced to the tech bro free social media.
Yeah! Here we're not tech brothers, we're tech gender neutral siblings, or even tech sisters
I thought everyone was dogs using the internet while the humans are at work.
Well then I guess we must sniff butts
Hi James Joyce here, what did you all say you were up to?
"tech bro free social media"
Lemmy once had a massive influx of new users, a lot left again and monthly active users has remained somewhat constant for a long time now. Let's wait and see how many people actually stay on PixelFed.
It's nice to see. I'd compare it to back when Lemmy was in the same situation and tens of thousands of users came from Reddit to Lemmy over night.
I suspect image browsing is less reliant on specific content creators, so Pixelfed probably has an advantage there compared to something like Mastodon. You're only going to move to Mastodon if the people you wanna follow are there too, while if you're for example just looking to browse pictures of food and cats you don't really care who is posting so you're not as reluctant to try Pixelfed.
I don't use either Instagram or Pixelfed though so might be totally off base here.
What? I respectfully disagree. The reason I struggled to stay on Pixelfed, and recently Loops too, is because as a new user all I was seeing was classical art, and landscapes (and the odd weirdo) but nothing actually entertaining. Loops at least has people copying stuff from TikTok. I'm not condoning that behaviour, I'm just saying as a casual new user, that was pretty much the most compelling content.
Maybe I was doing it wrong, but IMHO the content creators are the core of any social media. Pixelfed and Loops will both live or die by the creators they attract
ETA: I love weirdos by the way, that wasn't meant as a negative. If anything, more please!
I never vibed with Twitter or Instagram, so I struggled with both Mastodon and Pixelfed. It wasn't until I started looking for content based around my hobbies that Pixelfed really started becoming interesting to me. That, and having the ability to be absolutely deluged in pictures of cats if I need a morale boost. Mastodon is still something that I'm having trouble getting value out of. I may just end up being a Lemmy and Pixelfed user.
Corporations have learned long ago the importance of properly identifying your audience, and the Fediverse is not exempt from that rule. Lemmy is the Fediverse version of Reddit and Mastodon is the Fediverse version of Twitter, and just like these two giants could live together with each other and also with Instagram without stepping on each other's toes, so do their Fediverse versions can live with the Fediverse version of Instagram, PixelFed.
Now we're just missing a Fediverse version of Facebook.
There is Friendica... yeah the name doesn't roll of the tongue, and I only remember just for this comment.. no shade to it
Zuck would sue if they'd called it FediBook.
I actually love the name Friendica.
It's better than lemmy and mastodon.
Honestly, no arguement here. I can't think of anything better so I'm unqualified regardless
And Nextdoor
Friendica?
Lemmy is full of bad news, hate and toxicity while pixelfed is full of artists and people sharing cool pictures and their passion. Visiting my pixelfed account from 2023 a few days ago set such a contrast with what I see on lemmy that I started using it regularly. It really felt weird to visit such a wholesome place after using lemmy for a long time. Now I use pixelfed to balance out the bad stuff from lemmy for maintaining my mental health and to appreciate the art which is not common on lemmy.
I hear you. I'm getting tired of the massive amount of posts about trump and elon and politics. I don't see almost any new content about other stuff.
It’s like Reddit and you gotta filter out the bullshit. Adding Elon, Musk, Trump, and RFK to my block list improved my mental health quite a bit. Hopefully if it’s egregious enough it will slip through and I won’t be blind sided by some terrible thing they’re doing. That’s the only downside.
The problem is that Lemmy isn't at the point where I can browse it like I do on Reddit.
After the API thing killed my main reddit app, I just lurk on like 4 1 million+ user sports/video game/military meme subreddits and check on them every 1h/30min to see 10 new posts or any important news that happened. I check r/all maybe like once every few months.
The relevant lemmys just aren't that active or don't have low-effort post rules, so I'm kind of stuck browsing the front page of Lemmy if I want to see more than 10 posts per day
This is very true unfortunately. Maybe eventually but my fear is that when Lemmy gets that big it turns into Reddit
Maybe you could try banning words like "elon" or "trump" if you feel overwhelmed. Some apps have this feature
well, i'm against individual workarounds for common problems, there should be common solutions.
otherwise you just start alienating 99% of the users who won't put in the effort to install an extra app just to get that filtering, or if using the web interface on mobile, it's just not possible.
Gonna try that thanks!
Same problem with Mastodon tbh
Many groups of lemmy are full of political content but you can block them and still have a decent amount of contents.
The political stuff is leaking into any other community though. I've already blocked every politics specific and news specific community and a handful other communities and I still get a lot of that. I'm also blocking a few keywords as well, this stuff just gets through regardless of what you do and in no small amount either.
Keep downvoting that shit, let them know they are not welcome
I'm excited. I'm one of those users, but I haven't used it much because I can't find followers. To be fair, I never used Instagram. I like the fediverse, I usually see the same articles get sent through other centralized communities other than reddit (tildes, hacker news, etc), but I enjoy the community discussion the best around here.
Yeah, I never used Instagram or Twitter so getting started on Pixelfed or Mastodon seems a bit daughnting for me. But I assume it you like platforms like that, you just search out a few people you enjoy and then add more from their content and others do the same and eventually it'll all click into what people had in those corporate owned and controlled products.
I had kind of the opposite. Never used instagram but for some reason pixelfed just felt right and I started posting there when I joined the fediverse.
Awesome, glad to have you here future friend. If you know of people that may be of interest to add for mastodon/loops/Pixelfed please let me know and don't be shy, I am always open but haven't found time to search
Me too. I can't find you on pixelfed?
I'll have to figure out how to link you, I don't have anything much there yet. Just a few pictures. My name was lifeinmultiplec there as it chopped the name. I assume I need to give you an instance to find me though .
Edit: maybe this will help: https://breeze.pictures/p/lifeinmultiplec/786636194842492930
Yes. The interface is good and familiar. The majority of the traffic is on one namespace where discoverability is good. Because of the nature of the medium, getting started with no algorithm is a lot easier to stomach than just looking at what your local people have to say.
This is not to bash Mastodon, but they need that algo, which is why Bluesky is hoovering up users. Also, their UI, depending on the server is more tweetdeckish, which might scare off a lot of casuals.
edit: I've been informed the bsky has no algo, so somehow they seem to be getting better results in discover, perhaps single name space or perhaps they have something behind the hood.
Also, to start with, all the journalists FLOODED info, Mastodon, without any algo; you just got a hundred wordsmiths screaming past each other and they all immediately followed each other, so you couldn't just find people like Jeff Jarvis, you got to see everyone he had a professional experience of which is WAY more than anyone is prepared to read :)
Bluesky doesnt have an algorithm for its discover feed (the default), or at least it didn't used to have one, but provides an API for building your own feeds which lets you do whatever you like.
Bluesky's big growth was from the fact it was, like PF, easy to use and easy to navigate, and all the content was on one namespace.
Lemmy is an outlier imo. You can interact and repost and find content on different instances easily. Mastodon made following feeds from different instances nearly impossible which turned me off it permanently even if I believe in its value over Bluesky.
For not having one, my Discover feed was pretty dead on. Maybe just luck or maybe it was the right time for the right facebook influx.
edit: they might have one https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1g9zzca/bluesky_dosent_have_an_algorithm_so_what_is_the/
Lemmy is damn close to Reddit's mental design, but instead of 27 different subs for news on one place, there are 2-3 different places that have a news sub. news@here and news@there isn't hard to grasp, I think the platform works remarkably well.
The main Mastodon instance with their official app has discoverability. The difference is so much different from what I normally use - a 3rd party app and a 3rd party instance
Looks like pixelfed is just for pictures.
Seems like it's the instagram to mastadon's twitter.
It's probably closer to IG than any other Fediverse app is to its non-Fediverse equivalent. Although introducing Collections and possibly Groups might make it more versatile and give it Flickr features (though not perhaps the comprehensive picture info and ability to download the original).
It federates very well with Masto, it's just that the latter focuses on text and Pixelfed on pictures.
In fact, most of my Pixelfed feed comes from Mastodon.
On this topic I just want to point out the microblog format with twitter even BEFORE musk bought it had gotten very cold, harsh and toxic.
As a result the most positive thing you can say about people's feelings about microblogging is that they are bored of it (in terms of it having inspiring potential) even if they use it daily themselves and like it.
I don't think that is fair to mastodon or microblogging, it is just how the ships happened to sink as they crashed into the reef.
I say this all to emphasize that it is ok for mastodon not to get hit by massive hypecycles. Mastodon is useful and awesome, if people see it is as boring I say let that be a compliment because that means people are beginning to slowly trust the medium again.
Twitter/musk made people REALLY sad about microblogging and it is going to take time for people to get excited about it again like they do for the 'grams and the 'toks.
Bluesky is doing well though.
Bluesky has a serious marketing budget and a virtual "get out of having to back up unrealistic promises" pass for tech in interviews (everyone just accepts they are going to decentralize when it makes zero sense from a business perspective).
First time i have posted on anything resembling insta in 111 weeks
I wonder how many of those users are the same person with multiple accounts on different platforms.
It's strange to me how quickly I get +/- feedback on lemmy compared to actual comments and the replies that I get are almost always zero effort compared to what I get on reddit.
I get the feeling its normal for lemmy users to create multiple accounts and use them to sort of multiply their votes. What's worse is mods can see who is voting and so should be able to do something about it... so are they as guilty?
I mean, there's limited content, and Lemmy hasn't attracted the same kind of personality as modern Reddit. It makes total sense that things would be upvoted quickly, but comments would be sparse or short.
People patted themselves on the back when they showed up for being "old reddit" and "power users", but most of us were just cranky phone users who didn't want to use the official app. Lemmy users are not the boistrous, verbose philosophers people wanted to believe they were.
We're scrollers, sitting on the toilet.
This is a reasonable take but ngl I'm still a little sus.
Probably 99% of them.
Just trying to get in early so they can become "influencers."
Make no mistake, this is all about money.
I really wish it were more straightforward to deploy. It would be great to see many more instances popping up.
IG was always much bigger than Reddit.
Good to see people moving to Pixelfed though.
Great
It's quite good, in my opinion. If we had some bridge to lemmy's posts, it would be even better. Also I've checked and if you like or comment a mastodon post from Pixelfed you'll receive the notification, so, it's something🤷♂️.
You can post from PixelFed into Lemmy but you won't see replies and that's too bad.
that's cool, what's the furry instance
I miss that era of practical effects so bad.
is this wild wild west and if not why not
I saw instafops.net was an options when I was browsing servers. idk anything else about it or even if it's popular. Not my kind of server, but figured I'd share since it's something I saw and you're looking for.
Don't wanna throw cold water on what should be a celebration, but are these all distinct active users? I have separate accounts on Lemmy, PixelFed, Mastodon, and Loops--do I still count as one active user, or am I four? If the latter, I think it's plenty likely that others like me have simply gotten used to the first fedi platform they chose and are branching out as they learn about more. Maybe doesn't account for all the growth, but would explain away some of the meteoric rise.
This is a good point. I'm pretty sure that if you're active on Lemmy, PixelFed, Mastodon, or even have multiple active accounts on multiple instances of each of those (like a lot of people do), each single one of those would count as a separate active user. I really can't think of any way that this wouldn't be the case, because how would the statistics servers know that your the same person?
Pixelfed is really easy to engage with and get a feed started. I think that's let to its popularity growth. I've added mastedon and peertube and neither has made it as easy to onboard.
I still remember the curve with Lemmy. Pixelfed is clearly the easiest to get started with, and then it's just pictures!
Its' pretty great.
As with the time I joined Mastodon, it takes a couple of weeks to find what you like and build up a good feed, but once you do that, it's useful and fun. I wish it had more curation tools, but I enjoy it.
I created a mastodon account a few years ago and I log in every once in a while but I really have no idea how to use it haha, it just keeps updating a bunch of posts and I don't know how to make it stop
That's probably the global feed, which yes, moves super-fast. I found that annoying at first too.
There's a checkbox to turn off auto-scroll in settings, and it's got an appropriate name: Slow Mode.
Nothing works on pixelfee for me. Half the photos are just black. It shows an account has a lot of posts, but I don't see anything. Searches being up results but selecting one of those results produces zero results.
How are y'all getting pixelfed to work?
I joined an instance, I discovered some people who posted some cool pictures and so I added them to my feed.
Maybe try dropping the instance you started with?
I gotta say I am rather meh about it, but that isn't pixelfeeds fault. I just dont really care to see people posting random shit online.
But I gotta try so I can explain it to people who do because so many businesses (usually small artists) feel they can't leave Instagram because they don't know where else to market, and their followers won't leave because the business is there.
I can't recommend change without experiencing it so I can help support it.
I could see posts and follow users and tags, but couldn't make any posts myself and have pretty much given up now.
What instance are you using? How are you accessing it (browser, app, etc.)?
Pixelfed.social
Using the app. It doesn't even load for me on browser. I am assuming it doesn't work on browser because of something I got in unblock because it loads on mobile browser but it's very unresponsive on mobile browser for me.
How do I feel?
I was following my Lemmy rule and hunting out smaller instances rather than pile into the biggest one.
tried 4 separate smaller instance sign ups and never got a single one of them to work and send me a verification email, so I kinda gave up....
I find it sort of shocking that you didn't think people who use different types of social media would be swayed by non-micro blogging specific platforms. Nobody wants to join the fediverse because it's the fediverse. They want to join something that's fun and similar to what they're used to.
Micro blogging sucks. I hate it. I've always hated Twitter and none of that hate has come from anything related to who has owned it or their policies. I've just genuinely never felt a desire to communicate with 280 characters (historically 140). The discussion threads are also garbage and all over the place. Why would someone who is used to platforms like Reddit or Instagram want to use Mastodon?
Yes, it's done "not be a micro blogging platform".
*I'm aware Mastodon doesn't always have the same character limits that Twitter does, but that's apart from the point.*
I really enjoy Mastodon. Writers create threads to get around character limits. I actively search out others so I don't need algorithms to chose for me. If you want spoon-fed it's not for you though.
Is there a way to peruse pixelfed feeds from Lemmy or Mastodon? Or do I have to make yet another account?
You can just open the Pixelfed links using your Mastodon instance:
Yes, you can follow a pixelfed account from your mastodon account and see their posts in your feed. Paste the url of their page into your mastodon search to bring up their profile, then you can view their posts and/or follow them.
Yeah, but that's not browsing; that's targeting a specific account you want to view more of.
Oh, to browse all the posts rather than just one account's, go to https://pixelfed.social/web/explore which should show pretty much everything. (that's the main server with the most users by far, and any other PF servers are federated with it so most of theirs should show up there as well)
That's one thing that should be upgraded. There has to be a way to link your accounts in Lemmy, PixelFed, Mastodon, ... so "follow" becomes "follow with" and choose the service.
There is something like that on most Mastodon pages where if you are viewing it just in your browser rather than from within your mastodon account, you can click Follow and it will ask for the server name you want to follow it from, so you have to enter your server name, then it will auto-open it in your Mastodon account for you.
I don't know that there's much more anyone could do than that, since any given server you are viewing has no idea what various fedi accounts you may have. That's kind of what "decentralized" means--there's no central database keeping track of all your accounts.
You can sign into Pixelfed with your mastodon account.
Banned
Mastodon can view, I think, all fediverse posts if you are inclined to make that happen.
We just need to explain federation to them
Haven't really gotten around to checking it out yet. TBH I can read a lot faster than most videos explain concepts.
I know I can Kagi or duckduckgo it or whatever you people are using these days, but what is PixelFed and what's it an alternative to? News aggregators aside, I don't social media so I'm not sure if it's a tiktok or instagram or whatsapp or faceplace.
I believe it's supposed to be a fediverse version of Instagram. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong
I am here to not correct you. 😆
Thank you Santa
Gonna check this out. Looks interesting thanks.
We feel good.
👍
Lemmy can't federate with pixelfed yet can it? I know we have some integration with mastodon, but I'm guessing we can't connect to pixelfed directly yet?
It can but you can't follow users from Lemmy, same issue as mastodon
Excited. Anyone know if/when their gonna add dark mode?
Great 👍
Need better flagship app tbh. Pixelix is better imo but its 5bucks on playstore and sideloading on my current main phone is a hassle :/
Pixelix is on FDroid for free
There's an official app now.
https://pixelfed.org/mobile-apps
Tbh I feel a little queasy about the change of tone but thats how it goes with influx of people. I‘ll keep my strict anti tech bro stance and will rapidly block any bigots as I always have. People can of course say and do what they please here and I‘m not gonna stop them. But i also am not forced to listen to it. Thats very incompatible to the outside world so clash is inevitable imho.
The mood and anger here is starting to feel like Reddit recently and now I know why
Well it doesn't seem like there's been another Reddit exodus, especially from looking at the user numbers for Lemmy. There hasn't been a big screwup lately like with Meta or Twitter (but I think Bluesky is absorbing the Twitter refugees currently).
If it brings more diversity, I’m all for it. If it makes it even more super left psycho Echo chamber-y then it will just be annoying.
As we've proven, actual leftists can't really create an echo chamber because we vehemently disagree with each other on everything.
Have we proven this?
More users isn't necessarily good.
Every time there's an influx from whatever shit storm we retain about 20%.
? Why's that not good?
There’s a lot of gatekeepers here who actively sabotage the project to keep it niche.
Some examples of active sabotage?
You can just scroll through the comments here, and see some examples.
2 separate unrelated statements.
Banned
"when there were 0 users, the site was perfect"
Well, I'm glad you like it some much you want to preserve it. Best of luck.
Still no funny content so disappointed
Try #meme #memes
Most of them are political memes or simply are not funny
Try #funny, is not imgur, but at least no politic content.
Fine with me.
It's barely news worthy. Small mostly unknown service gains 400,000 new accounts. Ok. 400k.
Instagram apperently has 4 BILLION accounts, with 143 MILLION monthly users.
400K sounds great, until you compare it to the pie. It went from less then 1% to less than 1%.
Growth is great and all, but since it's January, I'd rather see a retrospective of where they stood on Jan 1st 2024, and where they stood on Jan 1st 2025. With a detailed analysis on all the fluctuations (which at this point I would assume to be nothing but upwards) but also, what caused each event.
But hearing a single month, with an influx of 400k seems like a non-story, and won't be interesting until Jan 2026 when we get the 2025 retrospective. And we put into context that this was when meta decided to go all political, and ban searches for "democrats", and the whole drama with tiktok.
Agreed, tho if they grew too fast the pixelfed infrastructure would just die...
Would the infrastructure die? Or would it just cap at a certain limit and lose potential sign ups?
Great question. Ideally someone trying to sign up for pixelfed.social say would be automatically shunted over to another instance...
I feel like it's people who want to make money adding another platform to advertise on other platforms.